The Current State of Selling Stuff and The Ineternets

Crumbs everywhere? There’s a Dragonball for that…

What do you get when you have a brand that randomly get’s flooded with images of their product and Anime? You get NatureValley’s amazing organic social community.

A weird phenomena occurred last month with @NatureValley and the anima community. It all started with one twitter member saying how they didn’t have any friends and then that’s when Nature Valley stepped in.

Going to buy some @NatureValley Granola bars before I go to school to discuss anime with my friends who don't exist.

If you want to see some of the FULL tweets and photos we’ll let you check them out here at BUZZFEED.

Besides going through and showing you why this is so amazing post by post, I’ll just give you the overall sense of “omg that’s awesome!”

This is a prime example of a community manager really listening. Something which brands don’t necessarily do. An issue that I see with a lot of brands is that they focus only on their core customers and their core messaging. For airlines and such, they love to be praised when they do a good job (some of the time they actually do a good job), but when they don’t, it’s a PR nightmare and Social Media is unforgiving. Usually if you complain about something on twitter, they will have a pretty standard tweet they will copy/pasta on to their feed with your handle in it directing you to some bullshit QA line where they can ‘Help you to the best of their abilities’.

This post is pure genius by Jess Wangness, the Nature Valley community manager. She listened, she analyzed and she responded. What she got back, I’m sure, was unexpected but it was great. She did what all community managers should do and what exec’s should let the people they hire do. She thought outside the box, outside of the NatureValley standard demo. She was a friend to someone who seemingly had none. She hit a home run when it comes to Social.

There are many amazing photos to see! With a simple community engagement, she was able to gain eyes on her product and open the door for user generated content (UGC). As community managers key metrics go, getting people to give you their UGC is the win. That’s the #winning or the #dowork or the #killingit or any other hashtag you can think of for “FUCK YES!”

It’s nothing new, but Jess struck a chord with the Anime community, a community I’m sure was already top priority for Nature Valley (insert sarcasm font). They created content for her and they did much more than make a few fanboys/girls’ days. They showed that they were listening, they were interacting. They’re about no one and with everyone. So hell take your crumbly ass granola on your hike, take it to your anime club, take it to your chess club, take it anywhere you are going to need a snack.

JUST DONT TAKE IT TO BED! Those fucking things get CRUMBS EVERYWHERE!

Rebranded package:

Hope you enjoyed and maybe learned a little bit. If you have any suggestions for future posts or comments please leave it below and we’ll get back to all of you.